The US rewards it more than most but fast point to point weather resistant transport are the ideal properties of a transport system by any definition that isn't broken.

Doesn't mean car culture is immutable, but it is transparently false to suggest it's not better to have these properties. Find something to replace cars that preserves these things and it still looks like cars. I don't think any other medium than tires on roads offers fast any to any connectivity in a big metro area, which is the ideal.

To expand on this, I don't buy that alternatives like street cars are an equally useful if slightly slower method. They're fundamentally less valuable. Any type of communication does more the more flexible and powerful it becomes. In the same way the Internet does more than telegraphs in the 19th century even though you could easily implement IP over telegraph, cars on roads do more than rails, fixed route busses, bicycles, or anything else.

It's not necessarily the case that cars will burn gas or have drivers or be owned by individuals, but I think they're here to stay as a method of transportation.

The US rewards it more than most but fast point to point weather resistant transport are the ideal properties of a transport system by any definition that isn't broken.

Those are all great qualities but of course they aren't the only important qualities. And once you introduce other qualities (like "energy efficiency" or "use of space"), then other options look quite reasonable.

The US rewards it more than most but fast point to point weather resistant transport are the ideal properties of a transport system by any definition that isn't broken.

Those are all great qualities but of course they aren't the only important qualities. And once you introduce other qualities (like "energy efficiency" or "use of space"), then other options look quite reasonable.

About to say the same thing.

In rural areas with low population density, cars make way more sense than any kind of mass transit. In urban areas of high population density with limited roads/parking, mass transit beats the crap out of cars-only.

Then there's suburban and everything else in between and it can be a bit of a mixed bag, with cars probably retaining a useful grip on some if not all of the transportation needs.

The ideal transport system isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. Cars are enormously inefficient for transporting individuals in a hub-spoke fashion, in contrast to light rail which excels at it.

It's inefficient in terms of cost per mile, but it's a more valuable type of transportation so the question isn't whether it's inefficient, it's whether the higher value of that type of transportation can bear its costs. That is already demonstrably true with most people owning cars, but it's going to get more true once there's carpooling driverless electric Google pods available to do the same job. That'll be much cheaper per passenger mile than cars/taxis/etc.

I found this really surprising -- I'd always associated the U.S. closely with car culture, an impression anecdotally enforced by my interactions with non-Americans. So what explains the American outlier?

The Carnegie paper explains that car ownership rates are closely tied to the size of the middle class. In fact, the paper actually measures car ownership rates for the specific purpose of using that number to predict middle class size. Comparing the middle class across countries can be extraordinarily difficult; someone who counts as middle class in one country could be poor or rich in another. Americans are buying fewer cars -- is it possible that this is another sign of a declining American middle class? Even if Americans are on average richer than Europeans, after all, U.S. income inequality is also much higher.

The US rewards it more than most but fast point to point weather resistant transport are the ideal properties of a transport system by any definition that isn't broken.

Those are all great qualities but of course they aren't the only important qualities. And once you introduce other qualities (like "energy efficiency" or "use of space"), then other options look quite reasonable.

More to the point, they're not the only user interface features that are important.

From a user perspective, the features you want in transport systems include

Not expose you to the weather

Take you from exactly where you are to exactly where you want to go

Be fast

Be safe

Require no attention during the trip

Require no attention when not travelling

Have a deterministic travel time

Cars win on some of these, not on others.

And this is before you introduce features not directly important to the user experience.

The US rewards it more than most but fast point to point weather resistant transport are the ideal properties of a transport system by any definition that isn't broken.

Doesn't mean car culture is immutable, but it is transparently false to suggest it's not better to have these properties. Find something to replace cars that preserves these things and it still looks like cars. I don't think any other medium than tires on roads offers fast any to any connectivity in a big metro area, which is the ideal.

To expand on this, I don't buy that alternatives like street cars are an equally useful if slightly slower method. They're fundamentally less valuable. Any type of communication does more the more flexible and powerful it becomes. In the same way the Internet does more than telegraphs in the 19th century even though you could easily implement IP over telegraph, cars on roads do more than rails, fixed route busses, bicycles, or anything else.

It's not necessarily the case that cars will burn gas or have drivers or be owned by individuals, but I think they're here to stay as a method of transportation.

Repeating the basic premises of my comments in the other thread:

To make mass transit feasibly you basically have to build upward and this is fairly expensive. Otherwise with cheap land people are naturally going to make do with a few stories tall at most, ie sprawl. Then the car makes sense because if you have to drive to get to the stop, and the might have to drive or walk a while once you get off, you might as well drive all the way there.

I found this really surprising -- I'd always associated the U.S. closely with car culture, an impression anecdotally enforced by my interactions with non-Americans. So what explains the American outlier?

The Carnegie paper explains that car ownership rates are closely tied to the size of the middle class. In fact, the paper actually measures car ownership rates for the specific purpose of using that number to predict middle class size. Comparing the middle class across countries can be extraordinarily difficult; someone who counts as middle class in one country could be poor or rich in another. Americans are buying fewer cars -- is it possible that this is another sign of a declining American middle class? Even if Americans are on average richer than Europeans, after all, U.S. income inequality is also much higher.

I've experienced this first hand. If you go to any of the BRIC type countries, esp. china, cars are even more of a status symbol for those who've made it than the developed world. It's completely crazy to own a car in their burgeoning metropolises, yet buyers line up around the block to act irrationally.

I don't know what you consider a "good" public transit system, but my experience is that they are slow, annoying, don't get you where you actually want to go, and if you consider end to end times, a car is superior, and a bicycle is superior.

Here is THE example for a good public transit system: http://www.zvv.ch/zvv-assets/fahrplan/p ... uni_15.pdfIt's the city of Zürich which has an amazing mix between rail, tram and bus network which will bring you anywhere in the city faster than any other transport medium can.

The ideal transport system isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. Cars are enormously inefficient for transporting individuals in a hub-spoke fashion, in contrast to light rail which excels at it.

It's inefficient in terms of cost per mile, but it's a more valuable type of transportation so the question isn't whether it's inefficient, it's whether the higher value of that type of transportation can bear its costs. That is already demonstrably true with most people owning cars, but it's going to get more true once there's carpooling driverless electric Google pods available to do the same job. That'll be much cheaper per passenger mile than cars/taxis/etc.

I beg to differ, I live in a major European city (Paris - France) and I don't own a car despite being quite affluent enough to afford one. By and large, cars are regarded as the least efficient way of transportation in Paris by most of the people living / working there and are only used by people leaving in distant suburbs. I believe the situation is kind of similar in other major cities such as London or NY. Here, if you want to get around, subway, bus or bike are the preferred transportation methods. They'll get you where you want to go faster, for a fraction of the cost and with a lower impact on the rest of the word.

From my point of view, once you reach a certain population density, personal cars aren't only inefficient, they are actually detrimental to a well organized and functional urban center.

I don't know what you consider a "good" public transit system, but my experience is that they are slow, annoying, don't get you where you actually want to go, and if you consider end to end times, a car is superior, and a bicycle is superior.

Here is THE example for a good public transit system: http://www.zvv.ch/zvv-assets/fahrplan/p ... uni_15.pdfIt's the city of Zürich which has an amazing mix between rail, tram and bus network which will bring you anywhere in the city faster than any other transport medium can.

Or this: Vienna Public Transport map; U-symbols are subways, S-symbols is light rail, trams are red lines, bus lines are blue lines. Note how every subway line not only contributes to the inner and outer distribution ring but also acts as feeder/collector for the more outlying districts.

Yes, there are routes where I can beat public transport travel time on a motorcycle (as a matter of fact I bought the motorcycle because flat.previous to workplace was just such a route), but for most that's to the western side of the Danube, I could at best hope to be about as fast as public transport; at the cost of having to constantly pay attention to the road, a higher risk of personal injury, and Fun in winter.

In a citizen cage, the number of routes where cars yield times competitive with public transport are lower still.

Of course, the entire situation changes as soon as you not only need to transport people, but also goods. No one is going to visit a home improvement store with public transport; on the other hand, individual car ownership isn't really required in this situation either. I can care-share a transporter for 11 EUR/hour; a Mercedes Smart can be rented for 29 EUR/day; renting a station wagon for a skiing vacation is about 400 EUR/week. For comparison purposes, insurance and vehicle tax for a modest station wagon alone runs to 800 euros a year.

I don't know what you consider a "good" public transit system, but my experience is that they are slow, annoying, don't get you where you actually want to go, and if you consider end to end times, a car is superior, and a bicycle is superior.

Here is THE example for a good public transit system: http://www.zvv.ch/zvv-assets/fahrplan/p ... uni_15.pdfIt's the city of Zürich which has an amazing mix between rail, tram and bus network which will bring you anywhere in the city faster than any other transport medium can.

Personal experience from loads of business trips in Switzerland where I try to minimize the rental of a car:

Even in Switzerland, outside of rail-based station-to-station travel within a Metropolitan center, the car beats everything else in terms of door-to-door travel times.

Already train travel between cities is dicey IF you only want to travel from central station to central station. Any other final destination than a central destination, the car wins.

The problem I see the most is this is a chicken or egg situation. In Houston, for example, we are one of the biggest car culture spread out cities in the world. Our traffic is a nightmare even though we have giant highways all over the place. I personally would like nothing more than to have more mass transit options. We have put up a relatively small light rail system that services downtown and immediately surrounding areas but that really isn't where most people live so it's only really good for moving around the downtown area once you've driven there already or driving to the edges of the service areas and taking the light rail into downtown. The same applies to bus routes although a bigger area since park and rides go further out.

The chicken or egg situation comes into funding for new projects. The highway system we have is so ridiculously expensive and they are constantly having to redo it or expand it because as soon as one of these 8-10 year highway projects gets finished, they are already filled to capacity. This leaves little money for new public transit options and even the projects that get approved usually get raided because traffic is so bad, voters get fed up and raid the funds them to pay for highway expansion. It would be nice to just say we are doing these public transportation projects and fuck the consequences but those consequences are usually bad enough that in most people's eyes it will never be worth it.

This isn't even getting into the car culture itself where people have given up on public transportation even "working" or being a thing. I would take a light rail in a heartbeat if it came anywhere within walking distance. Park and Rides don't do much for me because if I'm already driving half my commute to get to a park and ride, putting myself at the mercy of the bus schedule after that isn't really worth it. I'd even take a park and ride rail situation but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

Riding a bike in this town is basically borderline suicidal given the car/asshole culture. It's bad enough walking around downtown as drivers think they have the right of way in basically any situation.

I really don't know the solution other than moving (which we hope to do eventually) but we kind of have a land of the lotus eaters situation where for my profession I can get paid a high wage for lower cost of living but the traffic and lack of walkability is the price we pay.

The ideal transport system isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. Cars are enormously inefficient for transporting individuals in a hub-spoke fashion, in contrast to light rail which excels at it.

It's inefficient in terms of cost per mile, but it's a more valuable type of transportation so the question isn't whether it's inefficient, it's whether the higher value of that type of transportation can bear its costs. That is already demonstrably true with most people owning cars, but it's going to get more true once there's carpooling driverless electric Google pods available to do the same job. That'll be much cheaper per passenger mile than cars/taxis/etc.

I beg to differ, I live in a major European city (Paris - France) and I don't own a car despite being quite affluent enough to afford one. By and large, cars are regarded as the least efficient way of transportation in Paris by most of the people living / working there and are only used by people leaving in distant suburbs. I believe the situation is kind of similar in other major cities such as London or NY. Here, if you want to get around, subway, bus or bike are the preferred transportation methods. They'll get you where you want to go faster, for a fraction of the cost and with a lower impact on the rest of the word.

From my point of view, once you reach a certain population density, personal cars aren't only inefficient, they are actually detrimental to a well organized and functional urban center.

Very true, both in terms of efficiency and in that the physical infrastructure needed to support more cars can destroy very space limited population centers.

Back in the 1950's and 60's, Robert Moses proposed a series of interstates cutting directly through Manhattan to relieve traffic. This was defeated after intense opposition from community groups and in hindsight it's generally agreed that New York City would have suffered greatly had the project been allowed to go through. Similar expressways through the Bronx eviscerated neighborhoods and the consequences have been felt for decades. In response to the limitation in car infrastructure, New York grew increasingly dependent on extensive public transit and now 75% of people on the island of Manhattan do not own a car and 1 out of every 3 American who commutes by public transit is a New Yorker.

The chicken or egg situation comes into funding for new projects. The highway system we have is so ridiculously expensive and they are constantly having to redo it or expand it because as soon as one of these 8-10 year highway projects gets finished, they are already filled to capacity. This leaves little money for new public transit options and even the projects that get approved usually get raided because traffic is so bad, voters get fed up and raid the funds them to pay for highway expansion. It would be nice to just say we are doing these public transportation projects and fuck the consequences but those consequences are usually bad enough that in most people's eyes it will never be worth it.

People are sold the 'dream' of car 'ownership', which is a fantasy as most people lease cars. Leasing a car benefits the banks, car dealerships, insurance companies, and most importantly the car manufacturers. Urban sprawl of suburbs and near complete lack of mass transit force more people to buy cars. The vast subsidies toward the oil industry, car manufacturers, and highway construction is all geared toward keeping people dependent on the car.

Of course, the 'dream of owning' a car ties neatly into the 'dream of owning a house', then upgrading the house, buying crap to put in the house, shopping at 'big box stores', to using huge amounts of water keeping the unsustainable and environmentally destructive grass on the lawn the perfect hue of green. It's all some kind of sick fantasy that's literally killing the planet./rant.I'm a converted urbanite.

Ultra modern cities such as Singapore and Dubai are now constructing what can be considered the first true arcologies (from Simcity ), vast self contained living complexes with commercial, office, recreational, and residential, all wrapped into one...and no car needed.

Not everyone is temperamentally suited to live in dense areas. I believe I would either kill myself or someone else if I had to live in NYC. There's just no substitute for a single family home and car for me.

Men, since time immemorial, have desired to own better transportation tools than others. The king or lords never NEEDED to own their horses, as they could easily be transported by servants who pilots horses or carts, but they nevertheless did. They would also take GREAT care of the horses they owned, and not just because the horses could provide transportation both during peace times and war, but because they were statements of fashion, status, and so much more. Men often formed emotional bonds with their transports.

It's like saying women want to own the expensive bags because they function better. NO, women want to own expensive bags because they find them beautiful and they have always wanted to own the most beautiful things regardless of function.

This yearning to possess (personally own, not shared) what we find beautiful is what defines our humanity (think of the necklaces found in caves of early homo sapiens made of animal teeth).

Therefore the yearning for that beautiful Porsche 911 with beautiful rims, impeccable leather inside, powered by absolute marvels of engineering, is never going to go away and would not be shared with others (e.g. some commonly owned car that you can just call with your phone, like some ultra uber). Would you share the beautiful woman you love with others? NO, NEVER! The same goes with a man's transport, and has been since time immemorial.

Not everyone is temperamentally suited to live in dense areas. I believe I would either kill myself or someone else if I had to live in NYC. There's just no substitute for a single family home and car for me.

"Temperamental suitability" to one environment or another isn't immutable and innate, it's learned and adaptive. I'm not saying you can't express a preference, but don't pretend it's inviolable.

Cars can be fun, and some people will always collect them. But they're hardly some unique ur-type of self-actualization. I think it's pretty self-evident that the benefits of cars as commodities will, in time, vastly outweigh the benefits of cars as items to cherish. It's already the de facto standard in places with a certain minimum population density, as carshare programs demonstrate. And, it's arguably already the case among millennials, who have considerably less interest in owning cars than their forebears.

Men, since time immemorial, have desired to own better transportation tools than others. The king or lords never NEEDED to own their horses, as they could easily be transported by servants who pilots horses or carts, but they nevertheless did. They would also take GREAT care of the horses they owned, and not just because the horses could provide transportation both during peace times and war, but because they were statements of fashion, status, and so much more. Men often formed emotional bonds with their transports.

It's like saying women want to own the expensive bags because they function better. NO, women want to own expensive bags because they find them beautiful and they have always wanted to own the most beautiful things regardless of function.

This yearning to possess (personally own, not shared) what we find beautiful is what defines our humanity (think of the necklaces found in caves of early homo sapiens made of animal teeth).

Therefore the yearning for that beautiful Porsche 911 with beautiful rims, impeccable leather inside, powered by absolute marvels of engineering, is never going to go away and would not be shared with others (e.g. some commonly owned car that you can just call with your phone, like some ultra uber). Would you share the beautiful woman you love with others? NO, NEVER! The same goes with a man's transport, and has been since time immemorial.

This is really immaterial to the discussion. Nobody is saying that we should get rid of cars altogether. Unlike necklaces or bags, transportation is something that the community has to deal with collectively because it is the foundation for the economy and peoples livelihoods. Quite frankly from that perspective a "man" wanting his own personal transport shouldn't even be a consideration. If people just used their cars for joyriding or as a status symbol, we wouldn't have any problems and thus having this discussion.

To make mass transit feasibly you basically have to build upward and this is fairly expensive. Otherwise with cheap land people are naturally going to make do with a few stories tall at most, ie sprawl. Then the car makes sense because if you have to drive to get to the stop, and the might have to drive or walk a while once you get off, you might as well drive all the way there.

You don't need to build very tall to get high density. Paris, for example, has few skyscrapers (until recently it had a pretty strong rule against buildings taller than 121 feet), but has a density of over 55k/sq. mi. Even Manhattan, a byword for density, has plenty of parts that look like this:

Spoiler: show

In terms of cost, although an apartment building has certain features that make it more expensive to build, I'd think per unit they'd beat out most standalone houses both because so much is shared (e.g. the roof) and because units tend to be smaller.

Men, since time immemorial, have desired to own better transportation tools than others.

...

It's like saying women want to own the expensive bags because they function better. NO, women want to own expensive bags because they find them beautiful and they have always wanted to own the most beautiful things regardless of function.

This yearning to possess (personally own, not shared) what we find beautiful is what defines our humanity (think of the necklaces found in caves of early homo sapiens made of animal teeth).

...

Would you share the beautiful woman you love with others? NO, NEVER! The same goes with a man's transport, and has been since time immemorial.

Can Austin support a great public transportation system with a density of 1000 people/km2?San Diego at 1550/km2?Seattle was mentioned as pushing toward spending tens of billions on a rail system. They're listed at 1162/km2 (32nd by density)

I chose the Urban Area list over the city proper list because you get places like Atlanta and Philly that are much bigger than the city proper and if you only serve the core, I'm not sure it can be called a superior system. But maybe that's not the right interpretation. You will of course have higher densities in the core but it'll cover less population.

I think that different densities in the same urban area support different types of public transportation. For example, in the dense urban core you might have pervasive subways, in the lower density urban outskirts / inner suburbs you might have buses or streetcars leading to feeder subway stops, and in the low density outer suburbs you might have rail stations surrounded by parking garages. In the last case the commuters would still drive every day, just not all the way into the city.

I think that different densities in the same urban area support different types of public transportation. For example, in the dense urban core you might have pervasive subways, in the lower density urban outskirts / inner suburbs you might have buses or streetcars leading to feeder subway stops, and in the low density outer suburbs you might have rail stations surrounded by parking garages. In the last case the commuters would still drive every day, just not all the way into the city.

Rightly so. To bring it back to the OP, I don't think any type of transportation is "fundamentally less valuable". The question is what is most appropriate in a particular scenario. Sometimes the car is the best/only viable solution, but people are increasingly living in environments where a mixture of public and/or private transport solutions can be more efficient/sustainable.

Cars function like pants pockets for many- you keep things there that you may need anywhere.

But you might not do that if it wasn't an option, or if there was a solution that was better in other ways. And I'm not sure I can think of an example of someone absolutely needing the storage space that their car provides on a daily basis, outside of people using their cars for their business.

I'd love better car-sharing programs. My wife and I can get by with 1 car 5-6 days out of the week, but we occasionally need both of them. A handful of cars parked in the neighborhood that we could just grab any time would be great. And we already do that to some extent when we need to haul things-- I use Home Depots pickup trucks every few months and don't mind paying $20-$30 for a couple of hours to do so, since I'd never consider buying a truck that I only needed that infrequently.

I’m not surprised that safety is not mentioned as an ideal property. If you include safety, cars become drastically less appealing as a mode of transportation. I would give up driving to work in a heartbeat if I could, on safety alone – if everything else were equal, which they are not.

Weather exposure is sort of an odd one for me. In cases of extreme, or just really bad, weather, I can see it, but for most days out of the year? I just don’t care.

Of course, that’s just me. I don’t have numbers on public opinion for these things.

That said, I agree with .Darien that a singular approach to transportation is likely to fail. Likewise, a singularly-exclusive approach is likely to fail. If the goal is to eliminate cars, good luck. But if the goal is to maximize safety, efficiency, and convenience, then I think commuter autos can and should lose out to other methods of transportation. That’s not to say they’d go away altogether, just that their numbers would greatly diminish.

How do you think people survived to get to the last 50 years or so? You seem to think of many things as utter necessities that are very, very recent. You also seem to be unable to conceive of any system of exchange that doesn't go through "money made by selling things to cities."

People survived just fine in very rural frontier areas for many, many years - look into some of the systems in place. They're likely to be relevant again in the future.

Probably in pigs and cows, the same way it was grown up until about the early 80s. http://www.diabetes.co.uk/insulin/animal-insulin.html However, as diabetes is heavily correlated with obesity, a significant increase in physical labor used to grow food and a lower meat diet will probably resolve this somewhat. That said, high protein/low carb diets can work nicely for moderate diabetes cases - watch the glycemic index of what you eat.

Insulin has literally been around as an injectable substance for less than a century. Humanity has survived without it.

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Can they grow a health insurance policy?

Nope. Doesn't mean they can't afford doctors, just that they won't have health insurance. It'll probably be radically cheaper than our current health care as well.

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How will they pay taxes to support the military, police, fire who protect them without income?

Military isn't particularly relevant. The US is not, has not, and is not likely to be under significant threat of foreign invasion any time soon. Police & fire, people seemed to manage just fine a century or two ago.

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How will they support all the services they consume whether voluntarily or involuntarily?

Such as... ? Reduce consumption and generate services onsite or at a neighborhood level. Farm battery systems were a thing as recently as 100 years ago, and there are a lot of long-life battery technologies, some of which can be made pretty much by hand. Throw up some wind generation, and do without if you don't have power.

Unless, of course, you live in an area that requires you to connect to the grid under penalty of jail. Then it's a bit tricker.

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How will they buy the trucks to get from their house 15 miles to the nearest grocery store or restaurant or Wal-Mart?

Well, if you're growing a lot of your food onsite, and cooking it onsite with biomass, grocery stores & restaurants are a bit less relevant, aren't they?

WalMart is already having trouble, and if you're generating your goods mostly onsite or in local networks of trade, it's a whole lot less relevant than cheap crap shipped from China.

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I'm afraid the rural areas are pretty easy to replace with other rural areas in the world. The cities, however, subsidize pretty much their entire lives. As someone else further up already mentioned, without the cities financing everything, the rural areas would pretty much be third world countries.

If your global shipping costs are low, sure. If not, your local rural areas look a whole lot more interesting for food & such than the ones across the planet. I don't see how you can argue that rural areas locally are functionally interchangeable with rural areas 10k miles away.

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I would even take it further. If you drive through laaaaaaarge swaths of the rural South, it is very very similar to rural third world countries that I've been, sans climate differences.

Which, realistically, is something resembling a sustainable level of development.

*shrug* I really don't see it as the end of the world. Living within your locally available means, using locally provided materials, is a whole lot better than what cities are doing, which is basically consuming huge amounts of resources from around the globe, being utterly unable to provide for their own needs, and then being smug as hell about it.

Then again, I think a low energy future is rather likely. So having land and resources, to me, seems more useful than having a tiny little apartment and the ability to walk to a bar. I'd rather have the solar still.

There's a lot of stuff here.

Firstly, it seems like a running theme here is that you're ok, and you think rural people would also be ok, with them all reverting to some kind of pre-industrial Amish-type existence. I'm curious what evidence you have that they'd all be ok with that?

Also you said they could afford doctors, just not health insurance. Um, have you see what it costs to get a broken bone fixed at a hospital, complete with physical therapy et al? How about cancer treatments? You know what people did when they got cancer 200 years ago? They died. You've been a poster in the Soap Box for quite a while, so I'm sure you're at least somewhat aware of the absolutely ridiculous cost of healthcare in this country? It's more per capita than any other country in the world. Not having health insurance means not having healthcare in this country. Unless you're expecting them all to be on medicaid, in which case we're back to cities subsidizing their lives.

Next, you said the military isn't particularly relevant. Um, ok, except it's a huuuuuuuuuuuge cost center of the federal budget, and I've never met a redneck who wasn't in favor of increasing military spending. Maybe it's not relevant to their daily lives, but it's definitely relevant when we're talking about who has to pay for it. I assume this is another way of saying you're ok with sticking the cities/urban dwellers with this bill, too? How generous.

Then you get into growing their own food and not buying stuff from grocery store, etc. It seems that you honestly believe there's going to be some kind of revolution of thought in the social structure of rural areas, and they are all going to eschew the trappings of 20th Century life in order to revert to a rudimentary form of self-sufficiency. Ok, but I'd like to see some proof in the form of a study or something that supports this extremely unlikely (in my opinion) scenario coming about.

Past all of the rural vs urban politics, though, I think we need to establish some kind of basic understanding of this whole car culture vs. public transportation thing.

It's my position that:1. Moving 3-4k pounds of extra metal and plastic with us everywhere we go is not sustainable on many levels.2. Building cities based on the premise that "everyone must have a car to get anywhere" is not sustainable on many levels.

Do you disagree with either of these basic premises? Because it seems like when you argue about how much a lot of people hate public transportation, you are under the impression that just continuing the car culture is a viable option. If you have suggestions on how to improve the things you don't like about an "anything but cars" strategy (read: buses, trains, walking, biking, etc), that's one thing. Implying that we can just continue the car culture indefinitely, though, that's quite another thing.

The density question is not really important.Here a few pictures of cities in Switzerland with great public transportation:

Hardly urban nightmares full of concrete and skyscrapers...

But Vlip, by American standards those photos do show density. As with so much in American life it seems when it comes to urban planning that we're stuck in a Manichean struggle between the single family home on the 10,000 sf lot, vs 30-story concrete tenements. What your pictures show, as would most any pictures of any European urban area, is a pleasing core of five to seven story apartments, laced by tree-lined streets and surrounding useful courtyards, all easily fed by an affordable network of mass transit.

For strange reasons, America has generally not taken that route. With exceptions, such as much of Manhattan and a few scattered urban neighborhoods here or there (though those latter usually only go three, maybe four stories high).